In an excellent case of “here’s a sentence you won’t read every day”, Britney Spears has emerged as an unlikely figurehead in the fight against Somali pirates.
According to reports, Britney’s hits, includingOops! I Did It Again and Baby One More Time, are being employed by British naval officers in an attempt to scare off pirates along the east coast of Africa. Perhaps nothing else – not guns, not harpoons – is quite as intimidating as the sound of Ms Spears singing “Ooh baby baby!”
Merchant naval officer Rachel Owens explained the tactics to Metro: “Her songs were chosen by the security team because they thought the pirates would hate them most. These guys can’t stand western culture or music, making Britney’s hits perfect. As soon as the pirates get a blast of Britney, they move on as quickly as they can.”
Britney Spears. (Pic: AFP)
Britney is currently preparing to release her eighth album, Britney Jean, in December. It follows the single Work Bitch, although producer Will.i.am claimed the sound of this track is not indicative of the rest of the record. No doubt the record’s eclectic sound has been designed to keep any potential pirates on their toes.
Britney Jean will be Spears’ first album since 2011’s Femme Fatale. When it’s released, perhaps the British military can stockpile copies down a bunker in Norfolk in preparation for the third world war.
Funerals can be lengthy affairs in western Kenya, and Liz, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, was out late at a wake for her grandfather that had stretched into the evening. She was on her way home when she recognised some familiar and unfriendly faces in the darkness. She knew instantly that the six men in front of her meant her harm. A tall girl, she tried to run. When they caught up with her, she tried to fight. Her attackers, thought to be aged between 16 and 20, began by punching and kicking her. After she was hurt too badly to resist, they took it in turns to rape her. The problem was that the teenager would not submit quietly: she kept screaming.
When they had finished with the girl, they dragged her to a deep pit-latrine nearby and threw her inside. But despite her horrendous injuries and a fall of nearly 3.6 metres, Liz managed to find the earthen steps used by the workers who dug the latrine to get out. As she pulled her broken body up the steps, villagers who had heard her cries found her.
They quickly raised a mob to give chase. The schoolgirl knew some of the men who had raped her and started shouting their names. The villagers managed to find three of Liz’s attackers and frogmarched them to the police outpost in the village of Tingolo, in Kenya’s north-western county of Busia. The officers arrested the trio for assault and promised the girl’s angry neighbours that the men would be punished. At daybreak, the rapists were handed curved machetes, known as “slashers”, and told to cut grass in the police compound. Duly punished, they were sent home.
The morning after the attack, Liz (not her real name) was taken to a dispensary, a rudimentary pharmacy that is the closest much of rural Kenya gets to a clinic, where she was given antibiotics and paracetamol. It was only when she found that she still could not walk, a week later, that her mother sold their chickens – the family’s only source of income – and took her to a medical clinic in the nearest town. The doctor ignored the fact that she was doubly incontinent and told her she needed physiotherapy. Her condition worsened and her mother leased the family’s land for about £60 – effectively mortgaging their home – to get her to the nearest big town, Kakamega, where she was eventually diagnosed with a fistula and damage to her spinal cord.
‘One of many’ This appalling, tragic tale would never have reached the outside world had it not been for the outrage of Jared Momanyi, the director of one of a handful of Kenyan clinics that specialise in the treatment of victims of sexual violence, to which Liz was eventually referred. He called a young reporter at the Daily Nation in the capital, Nairobi, who had previously written a story about the facility in Eldoret, a town perched on the western side of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. “It troubled me so much I needed to take it head on and tell the world,” he said. “This was an attempted murder and it’s not an isolated case; it’s one among many.”
When the Nation’s Njeri Rugene visited Liz more than three months after the 26 June gang rape, she found a broken, traumatised girl in a wheelchair. The story Rugene wrote helped raise £4,000 to pay for an operation to repair Liz’s internal injuries, the first of two procedures the girl will need to have any chance of controlling her bladder and bowels or walking again.
What has made the teenager’s trauma even worse is that her assailants are still free. “She can’t understand why people keep coming to ask questions but those men don’t get arrested,” said Rugene.
Three of those who raped Liz are pupils at schools near her own and police have had the names of all six attackers since 27 June. After stories appeared in local newspapers, officers were finally sent to arrest those still in school. Teachers at one of the schools asked if the arrests could be postponed to allow them to take part in exams. The request was granted and police claimed afterwards that they were “tricked” by the teachers, who helped the pupils go into hiding.
Mary Mahoka, a social worker with a local child protection organisation, said cases such as Liz’s were the product of entrenched chauvinism in her home area of Busia, an impoverished county close to the shore of Lake Victoria.
Polygamy was widely practised and girls were not valued by the community, she said. When she first started to work with rape victims in 1998, she found that perpetrators would pay for their crime by handing over a goat or a bag of maize to the girl’s parents.
Last week, Mahoka was helping a six-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted by a man in his 20s. “It’s happening every day, but often it’s not reported,” she said.
Mahoka, whose organisation is partly funded by UK aid, has to disguise the nature of her group’s work, calling it “rural education and economic enhancement” so as not to provoke hostility among traditionalists in the community.
She has investigated the gang rape and says it was not a chance occurrence: “Liz had rejected advances from one of the boys, so he brought his friends to discipline her.”
‘Silent epidemic’ After reading about Liz’s ordeal, Nebila Abdulmelik, a women’s rights activist in Nairobi, launched an online petition with the international campaign group Avaaz that has attracted more than 660 000 signatures. “Letting rapists walk free after making them cut grass has to be the world’s worst punishment for rape,” she said. “There is a silent epidemic in Kenya. It’s not as loud as in Congo or South Africa, but the statistics are high.”
People walk past a poster bearing a message against rape on a street in Nairobi on November 24 2005. (Pic: AFP)
As many as eight out of 10 Kenyan women have experienced physical violence and/or abuse during childhood. A report from Kenya’s national commission on human rights in 2006 found that a girl or woman is raped every 30 minutes.
Orchestrating rape is also among the charges facing Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, who goes on trial on 12 November at the international criminal court accused of organising the violence that killed at least 1,300 people after a 2007 disputed election.
Abdulmelik notes that, under Kenya’s Sexual Offences Act, Liz’s assailants should face prison sentences of not less than 15 years. The same legislation stipulates that the expenses incurred by victims of such attacks, including surgery and counselling, should be borne by the state. “This is the government’s responsibility,” she said. “There is impunity from top to bottom, and meanwhile our president takes an entourage to the Hague at taxpayers’ expense.”
Avaaz and the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (Femnet), of which Abdulmelik is a member, plan to picket the ministry of justice and police headquarters in Nairobi on Wednesday, where volunteers will cut the grass in protest at the handling of Liz’s case.
The outcry over the fate of the 16-year-old last week prompted Kenya’s director of public prosecutions, Keriako Tobiko, to order the arrest of the six suspects and promise an inquiry into police failures. However, the investigating officer in Busia, Shadrack Bundi, said he had received no such directive and could not take any further action.
Rasna Warah, a Kenyan commentator, said women were being failed by the country’s leaders, male and female, who often left it to foreign-funded NGOs to raise awareness. “The Busia rape case is symptomatic of our society’s attitudes towards women. Violence against women has become so normalised it almost constitutes a sort of ‘femicide’.
Dessie Zuria is one of the most critically food insecure woredas (districts) in Ethiopia. About 90% of the population is dependent on rain-fed agriculture in the area, where drought is a perennial problem. The high altitude (upwards of 2 400m) restricts the crops that can be grown, and farmers have been reduced to growing a single staple – barley.
The majority of the area’s craggy, mountainous terrain is not suitable for agriculture, and soil degradation has reduced the productivity of much of the remaining land. Unsurprising, the local population is highly susceptible to water shortages, and the rate of chronic malnutrition – a staggeringly high 54% – is 10% above the national average.
However, the humble potato – previously unknown in this region of Ethiopia – is helping to transform the lives of thousands of the poorest farmers.
“I was dependent on barley, which is highly vulnerable to the shortage of rain, and my income was very, very minimal,” explained Seid Muhie (30), a farmer from Dessie Zuria’s Gelsha kebele parish. “I was ready to sell my land, settle in a nearby town and become a day labourer. But after growing potatoes, I changed my plans.”
Muhie was only able to grow 75kg of barley a year on his 1.5 hectare plot of land, earning just 450 birr ($24). He found it difficult to support his family. But four years ago, with the help of the NGO Concern Worldwide, he started planting potatoes.
“The harvest was very good. I produced 40 50kg sacks of potatoes from the same plot of land, and I sold them for 170 birr each sack. I was surprised by the income that I could get from the potatoes,” Seid said.
(Potatoes have become a staple food in the Dessie Zuria district. Pic: AFP)
In 2007, Concern started a potato pilot project with just 16 households. The yields from that first season were high, and soon the charity was inundated with requests for seed potatoes. So far 10 000 farmers in Dessie Zuria have benefitted from the project, and the woreda administration has rolled the programme out to a further 7 000 smallholders.
“The potato is now becoming a main crop in Dessie Zuria. And nutrition has improved,” said Concern project manager Merid Fantaye.
Seid can attest to this. His family now eats potatoes at least four times a week – daily, if there is a food shortage. “The potato is a solution for hunger,” he said. “If there is no injera [a flat unleavened bread that is the staple in much of Ethiopia] we don’t worry.”
World hunger, vulnerability to food shortages Though global hunger has declined by one-third since 1990, about 842-million people are still chronically undernourished. According to the 2013 global hunger index (GHI), published this week, levels of hunger in 19 countries – the majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa – are alarming or extremely alarming, and the overall level of hunger in the world remains serious.
The authors of the GHI, Concern, the German NGO Welthungerhilfe, and the International Food Policy Research Institute, blamed the continued vulnerability to food shortages on unpredictable shocks – from storms and droughts to high food prices and political instability – to which the world’s poorest people are continually exposed.
They have called for a wider focus on building resilience to ensure that communities and households are able to deal with the short-term stresses that push them from subsistence into crisis.
Crop diversification – which includes the introduction of apples and pears as well as potatoes – offers a way to build resilience, and is one small part of the integrated development programme that Concern has been implementing in Dessie Zuria and nearby Delanta. Working with the poorest people in these highly impoverished communities, the project focuses on watershed management, small-scale irrigation, the provision of clean water supplies, health and sanitation education, child-feeding techniques, and the economic empowerment of women through microfinancing and self-help groups.
“If you knock on the door of one of the poorest households you can find … food insecurity, water, sanitation and hygiene problems, health problems, inequality and other things. To address these issues, a multi-sectoral approach is very important,” said Endalamaw Belay, north area co-ordinator for Concern.
Belay is convinced that this integrated strategy has improved the resilience of farmers in Dessie Zuria. “Previously our beneficiaries had nothing, so they would migrate to another area,” he said. “But currently they have a better capacity to resist if there is a drought in the future.”
Certainly the residents of Atinit Mesberia kebele are now better able to cope with the failure of rains or other shocks. The construction of terracing on the high peak above the neighbourhood and the building of a small irrigation canal have reaped dividends. The risk of flash flooding has reduced, soil degradation has been halted, and productivity has increased for the watershed’s 200 households.
“My wife is also a member of the savings and credit co-operative set up by Concern. She got three ewes and one ram as a credit,” said Seid Asan Abegas (38), who owns a 0.75 hectare plot of land in Atinit Mesberia. He now has 30 sheep, and has constructed two huts from the sale of his livestock – one for his animals, the other for storing hay and seeds – as well as a corrugated iron-roofed house. “Before, I was a dependent on my family,” he said. “I had no assets. I am now independent.”
It may be just about the hottest new pop-up club in the world, but you have to look hard for the glamour. There is no red carpet and the bar has run out of beer. The decor leaves a lot to be desired: a brightly painted wall, some plastic chairs and dozens of palm trees.
Welcome to Bamako, the capital of Mali, not the most obvious choice for a star-studded club launch. Mali endured a wretched year in 2012, the northern half seized by a motley alliance of Islamists and Tuareg rebels, the president ousted in a coup and the country almost breaking in half before a French-backed government offensive turned the situation around. Northern Mali still dangles precariously between war and peace and Islamist rebels still make life uncomfortable for towns that until recently they occupied.
But inside the Maison des Jeunes – a community space cum youth hostel near the banks of the River Niger – artists including Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Idris Elba, and some of Europe and America’s brightest young producers – bop their heads in unison to the live performances taking place in a kind of defiance.
“I keep coming back to Mali, through everything that’s happened,” said Albarn. “At times it has felt odd in Bamako, with the problems in the north, but I’m just trying to personally establish dialogue with the people in this country and the music.”
Damon Albarn of Blur performs at the 2013 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indo, California. (Pic: AFP)
“The reason we are in Mali now is because of what’s happened here in the last year,” said Ian Birrell, co-founder with Albarn of the Africa Express project.
“Malian artists are so brilliant. We wanted to come back as a form of solidarity and do the tiny bit we can do to promote the music that we love and revere.”
Albarn’s involvement with Malian music dates back to 2000, when a trip to the west African country with Oxfam led to an infatuation with its sounds that would see him record an album with Malian musicians Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabate. In 2006 Albarn launched Africa Express – a joyfully chaotic series of collaborations between western and African artists, which last year led to 70 musicians taking over a chartered train.
Spoek Mathambo, Jack Steadman and Peter Hook play ‘Control’ at Africa Express, The Ritz, Manchester in 2012. (Pic: Simon Phipps / Africa Express)
On the second floor of a building adjacent to the courtyard, in an airy studio that has seen better days – with mint-green plaster walls and tatty floor tiling – ambient music maestro Brian Eno sits immersed, working on his laptop.
Behind him Holy Other – the enigmatic, highly-rated R&B artist whose full identity remains a secret and who is only ever seen in public wearing a black shroud – is similarly occupied, and Wire star, DJ and producer Idris Elba breezes in and out. “I’m just listening. I don’t know what to do other than sit there with my mouth wide open,” said Eno of the music being recorded by Malian artists. “I don’t feel inclined to sample and play over the top – for me it’s too complete.”
There is a deliberate spontaneity in the way Albarn likes to work with African artists; the word “chaos” is frequently used by everyone involved in Africa Express, usually spoken with a sense of pride at being involved in such an intense, cross-cultural musical frenzy.
The launch of live performances at the Maison des Jeunes coincides with the first attempt to produce an Africa Express album, as producers including Eno, Ghostpoet, Pauli the PSM from Gorillaz and Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs work out which Malian artists to collaborate with, and set about recording and producing them in new ways.
“I have never done anything like this before,” said Kankou Konyate ( 21), lead singer of Gambari, whose vocals soar out over local n’goni lute rhythms. “Since the war things have been difficult, and complicated. But this is very good.”
Albarn, who has been critical of western celebrities patronising Africa in the past, says Africa Express is all about creating a level playing field and building connections, artist to artist.
But the group are also under no illusions about the state of Mali. Eno, on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa since he visited Ghana in 1980, says he is shocked by how little progress has been made.
“I was quite surprised coming here how broken the place is,” said Eno. “How the streets are terrible. The open sewers stink. It’s very disheartening in a way. But what is really strong here is social infrastructure – it’s so powerful and rich.”
This is a true story. Somewhere in Bujumbura, the capital of the small African nation of Burundi, a colonel is building his house. He has laid the foundations, put up a staircase and the exterior walls, now he is fixing a roof. The economy in Burundi, like much of the African continent, is growing, and the price of land is on the rise. But people like our colonel, employed by the public sector, don’t always share in the spoils. In his case, the reward for years of distinguished service in the country’s military is only a few hundred dollars a month.
But the colonel also serves on the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), the UN-backed peacekeeping mission. For this he is much better-paid – earning a few thousand dollars per month. Peacekeeping in Somalia is not for the faint-hearted. Since the country descended into a more or less continuing state of anarchy in 1991, it has harboured fighting clans, factions and terrorists. Amisom forces regularly clash with al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda-inspired group behind last month’s deadly attack on Kenya.
Al-Shabab are now the main cause of instability in Somalia, and instability in Somalia means instability in the whole region. Our colonel – like most people who care about security in Burundi and the rest of East Africa – is concerned about the state of Somalia. “I would like to see peace in Somalia,” the colonel says. “But not yet. Not until I’ve finished building my house.”
The truth is that instability in Somalia has costs and it has benefits. The fact that al-Shabab is able to use large parts of the country as a terrorist training ground presents a horrific cost. Not least the death of 67 innocent people at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi when members laid siege, gunning down families as they sat at cafes and shopped at the supermarket.
The benefits, however, are financial, immediate and far-reaching. One senior Kenyan politician told me that Somalia is a “free-for-all”, giving foreign powers the legitimacy to maintain a military presence in the country and control over the lucrative trade in commodities such as charcoal – once a major source of income for al-Shabab.
And so there was little protest when European donors meeting in Brussels last month decided that the time was right to pledge an extra £1.5-billion for “rebuilding the nation”, despite the fact that, according to a UN group of experts, 80% of withdrawals from Somalia’s central bank are known to be used for private purposes and not for the running of government.
Former Conservative party leader Michael Howard has just spearheaded Somalia’s first new oil deal, despite the widely held view that chaos still reigns in its natural resource sector. Howard, who is non-executive chairperson of new company Soma Oil and Gas, signed the deal in Mogadishu in August, months after the Somali government said the fragile state was not yet ready for oil exploration, and the UN warned such deals could “threaten peace and security”.
The US has recommended the arms embargo on Somalia be lifted despite the fact that Somalia has no proper warehousing, chain of custody or management system for weapons. Recommendations that the UN conduct systematic asset-freezing of senior al-Shabab figures at the heart of the murky trade and transactions in and out of significant parts of Somalia have been largely ignored.
Into this fray steps a woman – originally from the United Kingdom – whose story as told in the British press is such an enthralling mix of the exotic, the horrific and the familiar that the ensuing intrigue can almost single-handedly power the Twittersphere. Enter Samantha Lewthwaite, aka the “white widow”, a British convert to Islam whose husband Germaine Lindsay killed 22 in the London 7/7 bomb attacks. She fascinates in the way that white women who wear hijab generally do – I’ve seen them stared at on the tube in London – and because we still don’t believe that women can be terrorists.
A photo of a fake South African passport of Samantha Lewthwaite released by Kenyan police in December 2011. (Pic: AFP/Kenyan police)
Lewthwaite has caught the imagination of the Kenyan press for some time, since police disrupted an alleged terrorist ring she was financing, but somehow allowed Lewthwaite to escape, believing she was an innocent tourist.
But far from being anything so straightforward, Lewthwaite is a series of apparent contradictions. Born in Northern Ireland, her father fought against the IRA, yet the cause she has chosen is jihadism. When Lindsay blew himself up on the Piccadilly line, she described the attack as “horrific”, but it seems what she actually believes is that his act of terrorism was a sacrifice which meant that for her, “the hereafter promised to be sweeter”.
The ratings appeal of a character such as Lewthwaite is obvious. You only have to look as far as Homeland – an entire series based around our fascination with western-born, white jihadist terrorists, which returns to UK screens this weekend – to find evidence of this. One character in the hit US show, which centers on a US marine who turns into a would-be suicide bomber, is Aileen Morgan, an American woman who plays a key role in a terrorist plot.
“She has the face of an angel, but she’s a killer,” the US press cooed, presumably referring to the fact that actress Marin Ireland, who plays Morgan, is blonde-haired and blue-eyed, which is not how terrorists are supposed to look.
There are plenty of Somali-Brits, Somali-Canadian and other Somali dual citizens suspected of involvement with al-Shabab, but they are black and Somali-looking, and therefore their capacity for violence is apparently less surprising.
Nor is it just the fact that Lewthwaite is a woman that makes her story so unique. On the FBI’s most wanted list of terrorists is also Assata Shakur, a 65-year-old grandmother who has been hiding in Cuba for decades after she was alleged to have been involved in the shooting of a US state trooper – an involvement she has always denied. It is the fact that Lewthwaite is a white convert to Islam that fascinates.
The media obsession with Lewthwaite reminds me of something that has irritated me for years: I cannot name a major Hollywood film set in Africa that does not involve a white American as the main character. This goes back to Zulu – ostensibly about the Anglo-Zulu war, but really about Michael Caine; Out of Africa – set in Kenya but really about Meryl Streep and Robert Redford; Lord of War – set in Liberia but really about Nicholas Cage; Tears of the Sun – set in Nigeria but really about Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci; Blood Diamond – set in Sierra Leone but really about Leonardo Di Caprio … the list goes on. Even Amistad – a film specifically about the impact on Africans of the transatlantic slave trade – is as much a film about the character played by Anthony Hopkins than it is about any African slave.
Samantha Lewthwaite is the white, western character we need in order to remain interested in a story that is primarily African. That is not to suggest her role in the Westgate attack was pure fiction. Like many other journalists in Kenya during the aftermath of the attack – trying to sift through the uncontrollable stream of fact and fiction emanating from its tragic ruins, I heard credible reports of a white, female jihadist wielding a gun.
One witness said he saw two white women with weapons directing the attack. There were reports in the Kenyan press of a white woman smearing herself with blood so that she looked like one of the more than 1 000 innocent people injured or caught up in the attack, desperately trying to escape.
Whether or not she was involved in the Westgate attack, Lewthwaite is already wanted for terrorist offences in Kenya and is believed to be hiding in Somalia. It’s the kind of place the most wanted woman in the world would choose to hide out, because despite two decades and millions of dollars in aid, years of training the military, the arms embargos, UN monitoring, expert recommendations and reports, it remains in a state of chaos. That, of course is the real story. But it does not have the face of an angel.
